Any reason not to rebind C-m nowadays?
reddit / emacs

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BettaGeorge · 2022-04-07 12:54

For historical/compatibility/darkmagic reasons, the enter key behaves
differently with a GUI than without one. All of its incarnations are
usually sanely bound to do the same thing, as is "C-m".

My question is, in 2022, do I face any (likely) issues if I rebind C-m
to something I actually use? I mostly use emacs on X. Single-key
shortcuts are rare, and I would like to use as many as possible
without breaking anything.

Thanks in advance!

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ndamee · 2022-04-07 13:48

If you use emacs only on GUI then rebind it. I do.

    (define-key input-decode-map [?\C-m] [C-m])
    (global-set-key (kbd "<C-m>")   'my-stuff)


 And look for other terminal bindings too (e.g. C-i)

https://emacs.stackexchange.com/a/17510

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BettaGeorge · 2022-04-07 14:12

I /mainly/ use it in X, but there are times when I have to drop into a
tty. I would rather avoid having two separate configs. I guess a good
compromise would be to just not do the rebind in tty. I'll wrap the
whole thing to check for `display-graphic-p` first and put
functionality in there that I can live without in a tty.

Thank you for the link!

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zuma0 · 2022-04-07 15:30

Interesting question. I prefer less finger travel so I've been trying
to use C-m instead of return and C-\[ instead of escape. Sometimes C-i
too.

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zhyang11 · 2022-04-07 17:56

Checking `display-graphic-p` won't work for cases where you have a GUI
window and tty window at the same time (through emacsclient) - maybe
look up `tty-setup-hook` and `window-setup-hook`.

Looks like the thing you want to do is to setup `input-decode-map` so
that on tty `C-m` is mapped to `<enter>`. However this won't work for
GUI window since now you can't differentiate `C-m` and `<enter>` now.

Maybe you can tell the terminal emulator to send a different sequence
on `C-m`, possibly using [CSI style
encoding](http://www.leonerd.org.uk/hacks/fixterms/). TBH this all
sounds like a mess.

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Horrih · 2022-04-07 20:14

For a similar reason I wanted to use C-i as different from TAB

I made it work both on gui and tty by doing some rebinding
- on linux, my terminal emulator is konsole, in the settings you can
rebind c-i to some other unused complicated binding you'll never use
- on windows i did the same with powertoyz

So basically my function was bound to 2 keys, one in gui mode the
other for tty, both actuated by the same key binding

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[deleted] · 2022-04-07 20:22

[deleted]

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Phil-Hudson · 2022-04-08 10:47

I think you *can* make a conditional mapping in `input-decode-map`
work using a function (untested):

    (defun my-ctrl-m (_ignored)
      (kbd
        (if (display-graphic-p (selected-frame))
           "C-m"
          "<enter>")))

    (define-key input-decode-map [?\C-m] #'my-ctrl-m)

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papercatlol · 2022-04-08 21:49

Nah, you'll be fine. I've been using C-m as <Return> (while remapping
<Return>) and remapped C-i and C-] for years without issues.